Steel & Oil: Warhammer 32K

"'Long live the Lord of the Night!'?"

The warriors of the Imperial Fists exchanged bewildered glances.

They had no idea what such words were supposed to mean.

Ever since the end of the Great Heresy, most of the traitor Legions that had betrayed the Imperium could no longer maintain a Legion's cohesion. They had fractured into war-bands of varying sizes, waging an endless civil war within the Eye of Terror.

With their hands full just surviving amongst themselves, these Chaos Warbands would occasionally venture out only to scavenge and raid near the Eye of Terror. Even when Abaddon the Despoiler—who styled himself Warmaster of Chaos—launched the First Black Crusade, the result was little more than a narrow victory over Sigismund, after which he had been forced to slink back into the Eye of Terror, unable to break through the defenses of Cadia.

The prosperity that followed the Great Heresy had arrived precisely against this relatively peaceful backdrop. Though barely a thousand years had passed since that rebellion swept across the galaxy, the new generation of Astartes already lacked any adequate understanding of the traitors. Their knowledge of those rebel Legions was limited to the fragmentary lines mentioned when recording the glorious history of their own Chapters.

"It's the Night Lords," Thorne explained to Lin, who was still straining to recall.

Only then did the warriors of the Imperial Fists have their moment of realization.

"I've heard of them—a pack of bastards with no honor to speak of, scum who take pleasure in slaughter and terror." Kurande, coming from the mother Chapter, clearly had access to more records than the others. "It's said their Primarch, Konrad Curze, was finally slain by an assassin of the Officio Assassinorum, and their Legion disbanded as a result. The Night Lords who remained all became mercenaries drifting through Chaos and the gray zones between."

"Then why would they show up at Port Sanctus? This is hardly a place they ought to be." Admidel was somewhat puzzled.

"The fortress world of Cadia prevents the Chaos armies from moving in and out in any great numbers, but slipping a few ships through is no difficult matter." Lin mused. "This suggests there may be a Chaos Warband behind Port Sanctus—or else that traitor Inquisitor has simply hired the Night Lords. And for Inquisitors of that sort, such a thing would hardly be strange."

Lin had already laid out for them what Inquisitor Vladilena sought. The Imperial Fists did not intend to abandon the underhive and simply withdraw from Port Sanctus, so that traitor Inquisitor was an enemy they had anticipated.

It was only that now, to those enemies, they might have to add an entire traitor warband with a bizarre style of operating.

"If this really is the work of the traitor, why would he stop the gangs from attacking the underhive's inhabitants?" Lancelot was the first to raise an objection. The Black Templars had never cared much for civilians, and the extension of that mindset made him find the Night Lords' behavior utterly meaningless. "Even if it cows the gangs into submission, what's the point?"

"Perhaps some kind of sacrificial ritual?"

Kurande offered the conjecture, but Issaga dismissed it. "Unless it's a specific target, most of the powers of Chaos don't care what sort of soul is offered up. If sacrifice were the goal, a single large-scale massacre would be far more efficient than any other method."

No one knew what the true purpose of these traitors was, and that uncertainty made every one of them furrow their brows. They weighed the traitor Astartes against the situation in the underhive, and for a time found themselves genuinely wavering.

But the traitor Astartes offered no clear leads, whereas that so-called Life Cult was an imminent threat. In the end, Lin made the call:

"We start with the Life Cult. That cult is certainly tainted by Chaos. If we follow them and dig deeper, the odds that we even reach the core aren't that low."

The power of Chaos was not yet as rampant as it would be in later ages; the Great Heresy, in achieving the goals of the Four Chaos Gods, had also drained the mighty power of those very Four Gods of Chaos. Though the rotting Imperium had already become the finest breeding ground for Chaos, they still needed a little time to gather strength before the voice of Chaos could grow stronger than ever before.

This meant that the odds of a Chaos Cult organizing itself entirely "spontaneously" in this age were very slim. The power of Chaos mostly relied on "the guidance of a prophet" to take root in the material universe. So long as they could follow this thread of the Chaos Cult and trace it back to its source, Lin believed they would sooner or later uncover the trail of that Chaos Warband and the traitor Inquisitor.

The problem was: in a situation where the enemy lurked in the dark while they stood exposed in the light, how should they conduct their investigation?

A frontal assault was clearly unwise. A Chaos Cult was not as feeble as those other underhive gangs—mere clay chickens and porcelain dogs. Even the most trifling Chaos Psychic Powers could claim the life of an Astartes. What was more, this cult had been cultivating the underhive for a very long time; who knew how many killing tricks they had hidden up their sleeves?

The sons of Dorn did not fear loss, but pointless attrition of their strength would only endanger their mission to guard Terra.

Lin understood this well, of course. His gaze swept around in a circle and finally settled on the gang boss, who was still trembling from head to toe.

Scum like this was certainly no promising material to be molded—but at the very least he could be put to use as refuse.

The mechanical arm on Lin's body unfolded, and the scalpel that sprang from its mechanical claw sliced open the flesh at the back of the boss's neck. Believing he was about to be discarded once his usefulness had run out—like a mule slaughtered after the grinding was done—the boss immediately began to wail like a pig at slaughter. Beside him, Admidel understandingly handed over a low-yield melta bomb.

Lin paid no attention to the boss's wailing. Avoiding the major blood vessels and nerves, and after removing several chunks of flesh, he perfectly embedded this small melta charge along with other mechanical implants into the tissue. He sutured the wound shut, then affectionately patted the boss on the shoulder.

"Mister Boss, do you think the loving Life Cult would take in a gang leader with nowhere left to turn?"

"They should…"

The boss, who had just narrowly escaped death, instinctively began to answer. But the moment the words left his mouth, the man—still steeped in terror—finally grasped exactly what Lin meant.

In an instant, his already feeble voice turned into a wail like a rooster with its throat being wrung.

"Why?! I've done everything you told me to! Whatever it was, I did it well! My lords, please, spare me! I'm just an ordinary man who wanted to ride the gang's coattails up into the upper hive—I've truly never done anything so wicked and monstrous!"

Lin couldn't be bothered to ask him whether he remembered how many people he'd killed. This was the Warhammer universe, where death was more common and ordinary than a meal. So long as they could wield a weapon, the number of people they'd killed was sure to exceed the number of loaves of bread they'd eaten.

He merely lifted the gang boss—who could no longer stand steady—with cold detachment, and gave him a false promise:

"I never said before that I'd let you go. But if you can find out the truth about that Life Cult, I'll consider sparing your life."

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